Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

5.23.2012

My summer with Lars: "Medea" (1988), plus a word from our sponsors

Because I’m a completist
and therefore committed to working my way through all of LvT’s filmography this summer—the good, the
bad, and the ugly—I made sure not to skip his 75-minute adaptation of Medea, made for Danish television in 1988. (vT also directed some
interesting-sounding commercials during this period, including a rather saucy
one for the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet, but I’ve unfortunately been unable to track them down.) vT’s Medea follows not the original Euripides text but a
previously unfilmed screenplay written by Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose work the
young vT greatly admired, and rightly so.
It thus acts as a kind of thematic hinge connecting both of their bodies
of work; vT and Dreyer are both preoccupied by, even obsessed with, what we
might call the “suffering woman” plot, coupled with a side interest in the
supernatural. (The other vT film
that Medea most calls to mind
is Antichrist, with its battle
of the sexes set against a vision of nature that is as menacing as it is eerily
beautiful, as the screengrab above shows.
When Medea is accused to being a witch, a woman who represents all of the
world’s evil, it’s hard not to think of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character in the
later film.)

What else can one say
about the project itself other than that, even at 75 minutes, it feels a bit
long? Medea constitutes minor vT in more ways than one. I’m convinced that vT did not really hit
his stride until the mid-1990s, with The Kingdom and Breaking the Waves, the twin successes that put him on world cinema’s
map, as it were. These early films
are the interesting but not always satisfying experiments of a fledgling auteur, not fully formed works. What they do show us, though, is vT’s gift for visual
stylization: even as Medea
plods lugubriously along (who would have thought that this story could be made
dull?), it’s often fascinating to look at. Debates still swirl about whether David Lynch’s Inland
Empire (2006), shot on digital
video, looks ugly or beautiful; one could start a similar argument about Medea, with its drab color palette and grainy, degraded
image quality that nevertheless somehow works. (It was shot on video, transferred to film, then transferred
back to video for its television broadcast.) Whether one finds it compelling or execrable, the visual
schema of the film is by far its most noteworthy feature—not even the welcome
appearance of Udo Kier as Jason can save it, story-wise. It also marks vT’s first use (to my
estimation) of the kind of rear-screen projection effects he would soon go
crazy with in Europa, the next
film on our slate.

EDIT: I've been able to find vT's Ekstra Bladet commercial. Not surprisingly, it's not safe for work.